Festival 2008: Joseph Valdez
Swimming to China in My Underwear
“What’s the Story LA? has challenged me to go deeper into my story, to find connections and meaning that has made my writing both more personal and more universal. Stacie has a way of hearing the story under the story and guides her students to explore what really matters. The workshop format is safe, supportive and
thought provoking. — Elya Braden
You start somewhere, wherever you
are, and discover — with Stacie’s wise, insightful and very gentle guidance — that you've got something deeper or richer to say about it, and so you go a little deeper, or wider, or backwards
or forward or upside down.
— Linda Morley
what is what’s the story?
Join our email list to get notification about our next 12-week session.
When the workshop is in session, I offer day-long and weekend intensives every month or so, in and away from LA.
The intensives are, as you might imagine, rigorous, a lot of fun, and can be tremendously productive. You can get in deep, quickly, and we’ll help you figure out a way to work on your own, with a partner from the group, if you like
Click here for workshop schedules and details
read about what's the story?
in The Dramatist and in Backstage West.
The workshop comprises:
1 weekly group meetings
where you present work to which the group responds in a specific, guided, utterly personal and constructive manner;
2 periodic one-on-one meetings
where we dig deeper into what you are doing;
3 regular public readings/performances
for an invited audience at a cafe in downtown LA, where you have a chance to get a sense of how it works in relationship with an audience.
For those writing for the stage, we work back and forth between principles of performance and the writing, as the one informs the other. We are always moving towards greater immediacy and a deeply personalized approach to whatever narrative or event we are using as raw material for our stories.
Recently, we introduced the “Living Room Reading” series, where a writer has the opportunity to read a full-length first draft for a small group of friends and peers from the workshop, and receive the same formal, constructive response.
